Last spring Dustin Curtis posted a well constructed although edgy blog post about the usability of the American Airlines www.AA.com website and their apparent lack of understanding that the user experience is indeed their brand.

Have you been engaged in conversations as to what online channel you should be investing in this year?

Do you have some on your team that say "we have to be pushing Facebook that's where everyone is…" or "I don't get Twitter, who cares when we are brushing our teeth…" or even "no one reads emails anymore especially Newsletters…".

As professionals we look to understand our customers audience and how their customers wish to be served and then provide the means to do that.

Did you know that the other day was officially International Translation Day. I bring that up because of all the great work Google has been doing to ensure your site is accommodating to visitors around the planet in their native language.

Have you looked at your web stats and noticed that a particular page on your web site received significant traffic from another country?

If so why don't you click on over to http://translate.google.com and start making your site multilingual or simply add the new Google website translator gadget to your site.

MindMetrics.com is a simple straightforward compatibility filter that uses picture sets to help identify like-minded people in a safe and fun environment.

The new website associates people of like personalities with each other using social science and a thin-slicing algorithm.

Similar to many of the case studies Malcolm Gladwell cites in his #1 National Bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, the website uses Scientifically-Based Predictors that present a paradigm shift in matching technology.

Different than all of the other existing social networking or dating sites, the MindMetrics Science of Simplicity transcends language, race, gender, religion, and politics.

The Lunchbox Collective team of Associates in collaboration with Steve Tansley of BluePencil Unlimited has been working hard over the last 7 days developing a simple and fun web 2.0 application that allows individual artists, illustrators, and copy writers to collectively contribute to the creation of a comic strip.

"Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens - as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession - the stool can't possibly stand." - Walter Isaacson Time

Do you have any ideas on creating the new three legged stool for journalism and news?

Some of the backlash of the larger traditional city news organizations is the opportunity of the smaller community journals to jump to the forefront for their local consituents. Using technology in a simple manner online would afford individuals within the community to participate in forums, blogs, comments, local social networking and events, etc. News now becomes far more interactive and the connection can be made between digital life and physical life - integrations that are truly necessary lest we lose touch with our neighbors. News at a community level entices members to speak up and become involved. The three legged stool here lies with advertising and sponsorships, local social networking and user content and participant support. Make no mistake, however, the art of true journalism should not be replaced with blogs and user generated content, but augmented by it.

If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another. There were many people who did not recognize Jesus or the Buddha, as there are and always have been many people who are drawn to false teachers. Egos are drawn to bigger egos. Darkness cannot recognize light. Only light can recognize light. So don't believe that the light is outside you or that it can can only come through one particular form. If only your master is an incarnation of God, then who are you? Any kind of exclusivity is identification with form, and identification with form means ego, no matter how well disguised.

Use the masters presence to reflect your own identity beyond name and form back to you and to become more intensely present yourself. You will soon realize that there is no "mine" or "yours" in presence. Presence is one.

Group work can also be helpful for intensifying the light of your presence. A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current state of mind dominance. This will make the state of presence increasingly more accessible to individuals. However, unless at least one member of the group is already firmly established in it and thus can hold the energy frequency of that state, the egoic mind can easily reassert itself and sabotage the group's endeavors. Although group work is invaluable, it is not enough, and you must not come to depend on it. Nor must you come to depend on a teacher or a master, except during the transitional period, when you are learning the meaning and practice of presence.

Lunchbox Collective is proud to announce that BLURdigital.com is now available.

"BLUR is a state of mind. It's the place where our differences are no longer a barrier to communication and understanding, but instead are an opportunity to explore new things, to adapt the best qualities of our intersecting cultures, and to EXPAND OUR FOCUS."-Will Mandeville, Co-Founder

Are you looking for a vibrant, fun and progressive learning environment for your son or daughter?

Beat the heat this summer on the cool shores of Lake Simcoe which is 60 miles northwest of Toronto to experience the quintessential Canadian Summer Camp.

Youth Leadership Camps Canada (YLCC) is an international summer leadership camp for youth aged 7-19. The camps motto is "Move You to Fly!" and every staff member of YLCC has dedicated themselves to do just that.

The camp in partnership with Robin Sharma and Sharma Leadership International provides each and every camper with tools to succeed. To achieve better results in school, to have more self confidence, to manage their time and set achievable real goals.

Don't wait to give your loved one a head start on their personal success.Register your child for one of this summers residential sessions.

To help you pick the right outfitter, National Geographic magazine conducted the world's first authoritative rating of adventure travel tour operators and we are proud to say that our long time client and friends from Discovery Treks have been named one of the "Best Outfitters in the World" by National Geographic Adventure magazine.

Stop by to check out the new “BizBuz” and “More Features” sections, featuring web exclusives, local success stories, behind the scenes with San Diego companies, an inside look at events around town and resources for building your business.

We’ve also moved up the San Diego Business News and Calendar of Events and brought more blogs to the home page. Check it out today.

It's about the field she has worked in for the past decade; Internet & Web Design. But this ain't your Momma's educational book. It's fun, relies heavily on her sense of humor and has complimentary songs viewable via online video that she composed & performed herself just for the fun of it! Topics include her dog, The South, Mexicans and drinking & shopping online. And, SHE GUARANTEES you will learn some useful things too!

Still Not Convinced?

Read more about it, or view the FREE Online Sample. Heck, she's received endorsements from two New York Times bestselling authors, but of course she hates to and doesn't want to make you feel you might be left out or anything….

As we enter into the second half of 2007, our pool of associates has expanded to meet our clients needs.

Whether it is best-of-class Flash programming from WA007, results driven online marketing from Mighty Interactive, or dynamic database driven web applications from HLF, we will continue to expand our dedicated pool of associates by delivering more value than our clients have any right to expect.

We welcome the diverse experiences and enterprise level expertise that HLF and Beau Frusetta brings to our team.

Beau Frusetta joins Lunchbox Collective from HLF Industries and Highwinds Media where he served as a database architect and web developer. His previous clients included Fourteen Forty Logistics, QCSI, Unicorn Financial Services, Wells Fargo, GreenTree Financial, and SRP. Mr. Frusetta will work closely with our associates at TM Software Group and Siliconetix of Denver, while serving as a technologist and software engineer here in Tempe.

Have you run into this issue?
I have on numerous occasions and programmers continue to inform my team and I, that "it can't be done" and they eagerly begin explaining why, while our associates quietly set about engineering solutions to serve the customers of our clients.

Regardless of what your programmers claim, there is always more than one way to accomplish your usability goals and serve your customers.

Stick to your guns, and Compromise as needed - but only as needed and only after careful deliberation and full exploration of implementation alternatives is exhausted.

In a constant quest to grow as an individual and as an entrepreneur I am frequently stalled by the day-to-day. The concept of splitting your time in thirds (1/3 doing, 1/3 thinking, and 1/3 communicating) makes perfect sense to me.

The doing part is easy. The thinking part tends to be self-centered and the communicating third requires some team work. I recently received my newsletter from Robin Sharma and as light dawns on Marblehead, Robin shares an enlightening activity which addresses all 3.

What do the best in the world at what you do know? What are they reading? What websites do they bookmark? What seminars and lectures do they attend? Find out what they know and dedicate 30 minutes a day to learning about that.

"One of the biggest tasks of leadership (and remember - leadership isn't about your position, it's about the way you show up each day) is dealing with change. And when it comes to change real leaders are learners. They are open minded. They hunt down new opportunities. They question everything. They find a better way.

So when you are faced with change it's not time to run–it's time to learn." - Robin Sharma

"Success is no accident (big idea). And it's easy to forget that successful people didn't start that way.

They started off ordinary–with a dream, a plan and goals. Then they made daily 1% improvements. The days slipped into weeks, the weeks slipped into months and the months slipped into years. Their dream grew and became real. Yet the first, and most powerful step took place in their minds."

Placing your ear on the track to see when the next train is coming is about as effective as looking into the sky to see when the next flight to Miami isn't going to exhaust your vacation funds just to get there.

Specializing in international travel and honeymoon packages for over 20 years, the travel agents at Mill Ave Travel will find that perfect holiday or all inclusive Hawaiian vacation package that matches up with your schedule and budget.

Over the years web design and the customer experience have had a love/hate relationship. I can recount numerous times saying to the design team; "I understand your desire to maintain your creative license and I respectfully ask that you step back and think about the design from a customers perspective".

Your website has approximately 7 seconds to elicit an emotional response and engage your site visitor.

Mark Hurst from Good Experience shares his team’s insights regarding site owners (stakeholders) and their inherent desire to generate all their ideas internally and build-out websites without ever soliciting feedback from customers.

If your company is looking to serve; don't you think it's time that you ask them, "how may we serve you?" rather than relying solely on your business needs and your designer’s creative license.

The recent high-profile removal of bmw.de from Google has been confirmed by Google employee Matt Cutts. BMW was caught using doorway pages that present keyword spam to the Googlebot, but redirect human visitors to the actual BMW Germany site. BMW's intentions may not have been entirely black-hat, since the bmw.de site is not accessible and relies on javascript for the main navigation, making it invisible to search engines. But BMW was clearly presenting entirely different content on its doorway pages, a violation of the Google webmaster guidelines. Hopefully the high profile of the BMW brand will raise awareness and increase aversion to such black-hat practices.

I\'ve only used scriptlance once but may look at finding developers there. If you are in the U.S. competing for potential projects, you will be in competition with many developers from India who work anywhere from $5-$35/hour.

Maya,
That sucks. We don\'t use that site, I just listed it because of some friends asking about potential freelance work. Have you tried other websites? If so, which ones? I\'m guessing there aren\'t that many.
-MK

"Typography to me is about design. It's about words and the conveying of meaning. It's about setting words that people read. A certain amount of it is creative, a certain amount is expression and aesthetics, but mostly it's about people reading stuff. Do them a favour and don't make it difficult."
Empower yourself and potentially your consumers by reading these five straight-forward typography articles by Mark Boulton.

Many people don't like being tracked as they browse the web. A recent Jupitermedia study found that more than half of the respondents had deleted cookies due to "security and privacy concerns". Rather than address these concerns, the advertising delivery networks have started to bypass cookies by using a Flash feature called shared objects — basically cookies than work only inside Flash — to track visitors. You can view your Flash cookies and set your storage preferences from within the Flash interface.

belated birthday greetings. Lived in Columbus 3 years ago and the fact that you\'re in Columbus, and do great work, was a factor in me returning to Columbus this summer…this time permanently. Keep up the great work.

We frequently have clients and friends ask about expired domain names. Usually they see the "expiration" date of the whois record and think they can simply register the domain for themselves after that date has passed. The reality is much more like sniping an eBay auction. Blogger Mike Davidson has an excellent account of how to grab an expiring domain name.

Mat Greenfield from Faster Marketing suggests the following to define your web site marketing goals.

Write down your specific goals for your website. These should be written remembering that your site is a corporate resource that must provide an ROI, just like any other corporate resource. To simplify matters, there are 3 common goals that you might want to consider:

To generate leads

To generate on-line sales

To generate qualified referrals

Now stop for a moment. Was your current site built based on any of these objectives? How is it performing? (Just FYI, the typical (poor performing) website has a 1-3% conversion rate of visits to action, whereas successful sites convert 20- 30% of their traffic.)

Following in the footsteps of Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Barcelona, the City of Tempe and ASU have teamed up to offer limited free WiFi in most of downtown, including the Lunchbox offices and Tempe Beach park. Looks like it's limited to web browsing only for non-ASU students, but that's all I needed to post this entry. If you're in the area, more info can be found at Downtown Tempe Public Wireless Service.

This has been an open secret in the industry for awhile, and now Wired is reporting on their own frustrations trying to determine how many people visit their site. There are problems and shortfalls with every method available. Even the documentation for one of the oldest log file analyzers pointed this out years ago. We still think the best way to figure out who's using your site and what they want is to ask them directly, instead of trying to look at a trail of crumbs after they're gone.

Among affluent travelers, 75% use search engines for travel planning. Email marketing was much less effective, being used by about 25% of the same group. If you\'re in the travel industry, it looks like having a search-optimized site is essential.

Two major redesigns this month! First one is MTV.com with their new slick interface, although you can still find some familiar looking elements on the interior pages. Second, Microsoft.com taking a big leap towards standards-compliant design, pretty shocking! Douglas from StopDesign.com summarizes the new Microsoft re-design changes well.

I have just returned from a splendid vacation in Sedona, Arizona and thought I would share a spectacular resource for finding a vacation retreat for your next vacation. The good folks over at VacationHomes.com have an amazing array of vacation rentals around the globe to make your next trip that much more enjoyable.

I used this site to find a place to spend the twin\'s birthday in Palm Springs last year. The the vacation rental we booked, was incredible. It exceeded everyone\'s expectations. Kevin, the concierge was very helpful and the meal that Stephen and David cooked was one of the best I have ever eaten.

So you know what back tracking is; as you fastidiously click your back button before your boss realizes you\'re surfing the box scores again, but what the heck is TrackBacking? The good folks over at MovableType spell it out for you, by providing a nice tutorial for Movable Type users.

Interested in a free webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes of storage and is fully searchable by powerful Google engine to quickly recall any sent/received messages without actually filing them? Gmail is your answer. Currently in beta stage see what the testers have to say about the upcoming product.

While Gmail may seem to be the best thing since sliced bread. On closer examination, you will see that the bread has horns and cloven hooves. Gmail\'s terms of use policy, allows Google to use and distribute the contents of all of your email, sent and received, to anyone at there sole discretion. While many people are giving Gmail two thumbs up, after reading the article you may just give it the finger.

Thanks for bringing these alarming facts to our attention. Some of the stuff mentioned on that site sounds a little paranoid though. Wasn\'t there some kinda controversy concerning Hotmail\'s privacy policy last year as well? As far as the government getting involved, that is pretty creepy but I\'m sure if they really wanted to get anything on you they\'d get access no matter what. Unfortunately millions of people will never be concerned about these issues and I\'m sure Gmail will still become a huge hit. As far as the product goes, I got an invite from a friend this weekend and signed up for an account to check it out. I must say it\'s pretty nice and fast. It will be interesting to see how this whole thing turns out in the upcoming months.

\"Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.\"

\"Google\'s language means that all Gmail account holders have consented to allow Google to show any and all email in their Gmail accounts to any official from any government whatsoever, even when the request is informal or extralegal, at Google\'s sole discretion. \" I don\'t feel so safe when I think about who may be asking. I am sure I am doing *something* *wrong*.

Which is a more effective way to get ranked by Google - paid Search Engine Optimization, or a meme spreading person-to-person through various online communities? Affiliate network DarkBlue has issued a challenge to see who can come up with the highest rank for the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. Merkey.net won the one-month \"player\" portion of the challenge with this page. Anil Dash has taken up the challenge and is representing the bloggers. We\'ll see the two-month \"stayer\" results on July 7.

Thanks to ieSpell, Windows IE users can have client-side, browser-based spell checking for all forms, just like Safari. I don\'t know why Microsoft couldn\'t add it, but at least someone figured it out. It\'s free for personal use, but a license is only $15, which is a small price to pay to preserve your reputation.

Two major product websites have been re-designed last week under new ownership. Take a look at new Blogger.com and MP3.com. Both sites take full advantage of CSS2 and XHTML to use rounded corners, sliding doors, direct concepts, and other techniques to make the brand and interface more friendly, approachable, and completely standards compliant.

I loved this article. Our work with a large telecommunications company bears out every contention made by Mr. Veen. We\'ve wrestled with Vignette, and now Stellent. What the purchasers of such huge chunks of software don\'t realize is that these are organizing principles for development, not ready-to-deploy \"solutions\".

I like Macromedia Contribute for the truly small potatoes user who wants to change content on a site. Peak has rolled their own on occasion, but these are mostly workflow apps, not true content management. The workflow is the hardest part anyway. Bricolage is an interesting sourceforge project http://www.bricolage.cc/. The publication metaphor is right (and i hope you like a LOT of perl modules - CPAN, here I come).

A nice summary of the good, bad and ugly in site favicon design from Maki. Having a good, easily identifiable favicon is a good way to help a visitor remember and return to a site, instead of deleting an old bookmark.

This is a great resource that explains how and why to turn off HTML in just about every email client. I agree with all the reason listed, but I think they got the order wrong. The number one reason you need to turn off HTML email is to prevent Outlook viruses, and prevent spammers from knowing you just opened their email.